Monday, March 23, 2015

Cli-Fi: the narrative of climate

Fiction is the fundamental lens we use to see the world. So, it is not surprising if, in this difficult moment, all sorts of narratives are competing to provide us with an explanation of what's happening around us. Most of these narratives are low level stories telling us whom we should hate and despise, but some are an attempt to bring us to a higher level of understanding of the world, describing the human side of a rapidly (too rapidly) changing world. One such attempt is climate fiction, or cli-fi; the human reaction to climate change. Some think cli-fi could lead us to do something to avoid the worst effects of climate change; but, in the end, fiction is most to be judged on whether it is bad or good. So far, it doesn't seem that cli-fi has produced true masterpieces, but, as Jorge Luis Borges said, human literature is a giant single book of which every story written by someone forms a chapter. Some of these chapters are being added right now under the subtitle of "climate fiction". Here is an article on Cli-Fi by Dan Bloom recently appeared on Inter Press Service.

Dan
Bloom is a freelance writer from Boston based in Taiwan. A 1971
graduate of Tufts University where he majored in French literature, he
has been working as a climate activist and a literary activist since
2006. He can be found on

Twitter @polarcityman

TAIPEI, Mar 10 2015 (IPS) -
From Columbia University in New York to the University of Cambridge in
Britain, college classrooms are picking up on the “cli-fi” genre of
fiction, and cinema and academia is right behind them.
While
authors are penning cli-fi novels — with movie scriptwriters creating
cli-fi screenplays to try to sell to Hollywood — classrooms worldwide
are now focusing attention of the rising genre of literature and cinema.

Jenny
Bavidge at the University of Cambridge taught a class on cli-fi last
summer at the Institute of Continuing Education there, and Darragh
Martin is teaching a cli-fi class at Columbia University in Manhattan
this summer, too. Cli-fi is a catchy abbreviation for the genre of
“climate fiction,” much in the same way that “sci-fi” is a nickname for
“science fiction.” With news articles about the rise of cli-fi
appearing in the New York Times and Time magazine last year, literature
professors saw an opportune time to introduce cli-fi classes into the
curriculum.

“Literary fiction has dreamed up many versions of the
end of the world, but how is contemporary fiction dealing with the
threat of climate change?” Bavidge asked students in her introduction to
the class last summer. “This course will focus on works by contemporary
authors, including Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan, and ask whether
‘cli-fi’ imagines solutions as well as ends.
“As people living
through this particular historical moment, we may want to ask how far
[cli-fi] novels contribute to efforts to better understand our
relationship with the planet and its ecosystems,” she wrote

One of my mentors in the world of sci-fi literature is the novelist David Brin.
I
once asked him about how climate change themes have been influencing
sci-fi novels and movies, and he told me by email: “Global warming and
flooding were important in my 1989 novel ‘Earth,’ but they were earlier
featured in the film ‘Soylent Green’ based on Harry Harrison’s novel
‘Make Room, Make Room!’”

Six
U.S. colleges have set up cli-fi classes this year, with both undergrad
and graduate level courses involved. And that’s just the tip of the
iceberg. This year, 2015, is shaping up to be ”The Year of Cli-Fi” in
academia, and not just in North America, but in Britain and Australia as
well.

Several non-English speaking countries are also looking at
cli-fi and how it impacts their own literary circles, including Brazil,
Spain, Germany and France.
While six universities and colleges in
the United States have taken up the call and are part of the new trend
in higher education in 2015, the genre is reaching out worldwide to
writers (and readers) across the globe. Cli-fi is not an American or
British genre; it has become a global genre.

The Chronicle of
Higher Education newspaper in Washington, D.C., which covers academic
issues in a variety of subject areas, has assigned a staff reporter to
look into the rise of clifi in the academy as well, according to
sources.
In addition to Martin’s summer class at Columbia, which
starts on May 27, professors at Temple University in Philadelphia, the
University of Oregon, Holyoke Community College, the State University of
New York in Geneseo (SUNY Geneseo) and The University of Delaware are
currently teaching cli-fi classes this semester, with a total of about
200 students nationwide enrolled.
It’s a beginning. And there’s more to come.

Academics
writing in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, among other world languages
are putting out papers about cli-fi and planning classes in the genre
at the universities where they teach.

There is, of course, a long
and storied history of teaching sci-fi at colleges in North America and
Britain, with several universities even setting up literature
departments that specialise in sci-fi research. Now cli-fi is joining
the global academic world and finding a room of its own there as well.

Elizabeth
Trobaugh and Steve Winters at Holyoke Community College are
team-teaching a climate-themed literature class this semester titled
“Cli Fi: Stories and Science from the Coming Climate Apocalypse.”

When
I told Trobaugh that I planned to write an oped about her course, she
replied: “Thank you for your interest in what we are doing this
semester. Professor Winters and I thought we were onto something, and
your email confirms our conviction that cli-fi is indeed on the rise,
and this is the moment (as Macklemore says in the song) to catch the
wave.”

Stephen Siperstein, a doctoral student at the University of
Oregon, is also teaching a cli-fi literature class this semester, with
his undergrad students posting weekly class blogs about what they are
reading and how they are reacting to the new genre of fiction.

At
Temple University, Ted Howell is teaching an undergraduate class titled
“Cli-fi: Science Fiction, Climate Change, and Apocalypse” with about 30
students enrolled. They are also keeping weekly blogs about the course,
using them to interact online outside of class with their professor and
fellow students.
At SUNY Geneseo in upstate New York, Professor Ken Cooper is teaching a class this semester titled “Reader and Text: Cli-Fi.”

”Representative
works will include Paolo Bacigalupi’s ‘The Windup Girl,’ Barbara
Kingsolver’s ‘Flight Behavior,’ and other novels,” Cooper told his
students by way of introduction, adding mischievously: “There will be at
least one zombie apocalypse, too.”

Siohban Carroll at the
University of Delaware is a specialist in 19th century British
literature, and told me in a recent Tweet: “I’m teaching a 19th Century
‘cli-fi’ class right now at the graduate level. One segment is on Mary
Shelley and the Anthropocene.”

So there you have it. Cli-fi has
reached into academia and found partners on college campuses. It’s a
worldwide trend because global warming impacts us all, and literature
and cinema always respond to the things that matter.